Writing in the Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria explains how Trump has driven pivotal countries–like India, Brazil, and South Africa–into the embrace of our enemies: Russia, China, and North Korea. For his own bizarre and inexplicable reasons, Trump has tried to cozy up to the leaders of those countries, which have a common interest in opposing democratic countries. He has boasted about his close friendship with Putin, Xi, and Kim Jong Un, but they are laughing at him. Trump’s insane tariffs have been harsh towards our allies, which makes no sense at all.
Zakaria wrote:
Look at the pictures that dominated this week’s world news. They are vivid illustrations of the failures of President Donald Trump’s foreign policy.
The photographs that captured most attention were of China’s massive military parade and of Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un striding together. Those visuals were to be expected — a reminder that the West faces a determined set of adversaries who see it as their mission to destroy the Western-led international order.
What was surprising were the images from the days before, when the Shanghai Cooperation Organization hosted leaders from India, Turkey, Vietnam and Egypt, among others. All these regional powers were generally considered closer to Washington than Beijing. But a toxic combination of tariffs, hostile rhetoric and ideological demands is moving many of the world’s pivotal states away from the United States and toward China. It might be the greatest own goal in modern foreign policy.
Consider the BRICS, a grouping of countries originally meant to represent the big emerging markets of the future — Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa — along with several other members now, too. At meetings, three of the core countries, Brazil, India and South Africa, would generally resist the Russian and Chinese effort to turn the organization into an anti-American grouping. For decades, Washington has been building ties with these three countries, each a leader in its region, to ensure that as they grew in size and stature, they would be favorably inclined toward the United States.
But Trump has treated those pivotal states to some of his most vicious rhetoric and aggressive policies. He unleashed the highest tariff rate in the world against India. He punished Brazil with equally high tariffs and levied sanctions and visa bans against Brazilian officials. South Africa faces 30 percent tariffs, a total cutoff of foreign aid and potential sanctions against government officials.
The governments and people in these countries are outraged at their treatment. India used to be overwhelmingly pro-American. Now it is rapidly shifting toward a deep suspicion of Washington. In Brazil, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s sagging poll numbers have risen as he stands up to Trump’s bullying. In South Africa, President Cyril Ramaphosa gained stature when he politely responded to Trump’s Oval Office hectoring. It is worth remembering that other countries have nationalist sentiment, too!
There is no strategic rationale for these policy reversals. Trump is punishing Brazil because that country’s independent courts are holding accountable Trump’s ideological soulmate, Jair Bolsonaro, for his efforts to reject the results of free and fair elections. South Africa faces Trump’s ire because of a land reform law that is an attempt to address some of the vast disparities in landholding and wealth caused by decades of apartheid. These reasons have nothing to do with restoring America’s manufacturing base or reducing trade deficits. The U.S. actually runs a trade surplus with Brazil.
While Washington has been alienating these countries, China has been courting them. It has outlined a plan with Brazil for a transformative railway network connecting its Atlantic coast to Peru’s Pacific one. Xi managed to get Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi to visit China for the first time in seven years. China has courted South Africa with trade and aid, and public sentiment in that country has moved to be quite favorably inclined toward Beijing.
We are often told that Trump likes to talk tough to get the best deal. But his policies are producing real pain and misery on the ground — people losing their jobs and many being pushed back into poverty. That’s why even if these deals are renegotiated and things settle on less brutal terms, the memories will linger. Countries will always know that Washington could treat them as it has and they will want to hedge their bets and keep strong ties with China and Russia, just in case.
American foreign policy these days is a collection of the random slights, insults and ideological obsessions of one man. In general, Trump likes smaller countries he can bully or ideological soulmates who cozy up to him. He doesn’t enjoy dealing with large, messy democracies with their own internal dynamics, pride and nationalism.
Thus, America under Trump has befriended a strange collection of strongmen, in El Salvador, Hungary, Pakistan and the Gulf monarchies. It is at odds with the democracies of India, Brazil, South Africa, Mexico, Canada and most of Europe. Does this make any sense?
I seldom recommend a blog that requires payment. Here is an exception: Glenn Kessler. He served for many years as the Fact Checker for The Washington Post. He is remarkably good as a fact checker. After many years, he left The Post and started his own blog, as so many other journalists have done. He is a member of the International Society of Factcheckers. He relies on facts, not opinion. Consider subscribing. He has my stamp of approval.
Kessler recently started a series about Trump’s long history of bullshitting. As he explains here, there is a difference between lying and bullshit.
Kessler writes:
This is the first in a series of Substack essays looking at Trump’s bullshit. Future installments will be available to paid subscribers.
Twenty years ago this month, the late Princeton philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt published his seminal work On Bullshit, which argued that bullshit was worse than lying. His point was that a liar knows the truth and deliberately tries to hide or distort it, while a bullshitter doesn’t care about the truth at all — they care only about the impression they make.
When Donald Trump emerged on the political stage in 2015, Frankfurt wrote in Time magazine that Trump was the epitome of the bullshit artist he had identified a decade earlier.
“Trump freely offers extravagant claims about his own talents and accomplishments,” Frankfurt said. “He maintains, for example, that he has the greatest memory in the world. This is farcically unalloyed bullshit.”
When I managed The Fact Checker for The Washington Post, readers constantly asked: Why rely only on Pinocchio ratings? Why don’t you call Trump a liar?
I thought “liar” was a conversation stopper — it would be my judgment that he lied. With Trump, it’s hard to tell. He might actually believe some of the stuff he says, or has convinced himself it’s true.
The one time I clearly labeled a lie was when I had convincing evidence. Trump had insisted he knew nothing about hush-money payments to silence alleged paramours before he was elected president. Then his former attorney released a recording of Trump discussing an arrangement with the National Enquirer to pay $150,000 to one woman. Trump was caught on tape, so there was no doubt Trump had lied.
But, following Frankfurt’s theory, focusing only on Trump’s lies obscures a deeper danger to American society. As a bullshitter, Trump doesn’t care whether what he says reflects reality. He says whatever serves his momentary purpose, often contradicting himself without hesitation or shame. This indifference to truth makes Trump’s bullshit more insidious than lies.
Trump is the dominant political figure of the past decade — perhaps of our lifetimes. Tens of millions of Americans support his policies, or at least disdain the policies of his Democratic opponents. In the last election, he narrowly won both the Electoral College and the popular vote. He views those victories as a mandate for a reordering of the federal government, with an unchallenged executive wielding vast power.
The danger is that Trump’s bullshit has become woven into the fabric of American life. Many citizens now struggle to discern reality from spin. Was January 6 a violent attack on democracy — or a peaceful protest demonized by the media? Was Joe Biden legitimately elected — or did Democrats steal the presidency in the greatest fraud in U.S. history?
Trump bullshits to construct an alternative reality — one that almost half the country has accepted as fact. He has been aided by the balkanization of American society, where people live in blue or red zones and often absorb information that confirms what they already believe. Social media, unfiltered and often partisan, has replaced legacy media as a source of information.
Trump’s handling of the Covid pandemic in his first term was disastrous, with the exception of producing vaccines in record time. Yet Americans seemed to erase that period from memory. Thanks to Trump’s relentless bullshit during his first term about having created the “greatest economy in history” — in reality, it was on the brink of recession when the pandemic struck — many Americans retained halcyon memories of Trump’s economic policies, especially once inflation soared in the pandemic’s aftermath.
I often wondered how, if Trump had been re-elected in 2020, he would have explained the runaway inflation. I can only guess, but in any case, he would have spouted bullshit. Most economists agree Biden’s policies added some inflationary pressures on the margins, but pandemic-related supply-chain issues were mostly responsible.
In his second term, Trump has weaponized his bullshit. He is surrounded by lackeys who echo and defend his untruths.
No accurate damage estimate was available when Trump in June declared Iranian nuclear weapons sites had been obliterated. So when he made the statement he was bullshitting. In previous administrations, the results of such an attack might have received positive spin from unnamed officials, but since Trump is never wrong, once he puts it in his own words, the rest of government must twist its findings to conform with Trump’s claim.
Sometimes Trump gets lucky, and his bullshit turns out to be true. But more often than not, he just pretends he was right even when he was wrong.
Trump a few weeks ago fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because job-growth estimates were revised downward — a common occurrence, especially if an economy is stumbling. Trump claimed the BLS director had manipulated the figures because she was a Biden appointee. That was bullshit. The BLS director cannot manipulate the job numbers, which are derived from surveys conducted by professionals many rungs below in the Labor Department. Yet Trump’s bullshit now threatens to erode faith in the accuracy of federal data.
This week provided another example. Trump, desperate to win a Nobel Peace Prize ever since Barack Obama did, keeps claiming he ended six wars in six months. This is, of course, exaggerated, as numerousfact checks have documented. But Trump took it a step further when Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky and European leaders visited the Oval Office and Trump explained to reporters why he had dropped his demand for a ceasefire in the Russia-Ukraine war.
“If you look at the six deals that I settled this year, they were all at war. I didn’t do any ceasefires,” Trump said.
That was bullshit. At least three of the conflicts on Trump’s “six wars” list were halted with ceasefires. But Trump needed to explain why he folded on his demand for an immediate ceasefire — embraced by Ukraine — in the face of Russian president Vladimir Putin’s charm offensive in Alaska last week.
So he just invented bullshit on the spot. The consequence is that Russia feels no pressure to end the war and can continue shelling Ukrainian cities. More people will die.
As part of this Substack, I intend to write a series of essays that examine specific examples of Trump’s bullshit and the consequences. I will likely start with Trump’s claim that he was a self-made business success — so central to the myth that carried him into office — but I also welcome suggestions from readers. Future posts on this theme will be limited to paid subscribers, so please consider signing up.
Trump’s central tactic is saturation — flood the zone with bullshit until the truth becomes impossible to locate. I intend to create a record of what happened before it’s lost in a storm of revisionism and propaganda.
To open the next Glenn Kessler fact-checks, become a subscriber.
Trump announced that he will bring back prayer in the schools. This is a prize for his Christian nationalist base, who want the nation to be a theological, Bible-based state.
Trump recently appeared at the Museum of the Bible (who knew?) where he made clear his plans.
This is alarming but also amusing. Trump is probably the least religious man ever elected President. Sunday mornings, he is on the golf course, not in church. He has violated every one of the Ten Commandments.
President Donald Trump on Monday said that the Department of Education would soon be instituting new guidelines on the right to prayer in public schools.
Speaking from an event at the Museum of the Bible in Washington, Trump said there are “grave threats to religious liberty in American schools.”
“For most of our country’s history, the Bible was found in every classroom in the nation, yet in many schools today students are instead indoctrinated with anti-religious propaganda and some are punished for their religious beliefs. Very, very strongly punished,” Trump said. “It is ridiculous.”
Trump did not detail what the new guidance will include, but during the 2024 campaign he promised to “bring back prayer” to public schools.
In a statement to POLITICO, Savannah Newhouse, press secretary for the Education Department said, “The Department of Education looks forward to supporting President Trump’s vision to promote religious liberty in our schools across the country.”
While religion is not banned in public schools, the Supreme Court ruled in 1962 that state-sponsored prayer in public schools violates the First Amendment.
When I heard that MAGA firebrand Charlie Kirk had been shot and killed at a campus rally in Utah, I got a familiar feeling in the pit of my stomach. I had a visceral memory of the day that President John F. Kennedy was killed, the day that Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, the day that Bobby Kennedy was killed.
I loved them. I didn’t love or admire Charlie Kirk. I never agreed with anything he said.
But I despise political violence. I am sorry for his family.
We are supposed to be a nation that protects dissent, protest, and diverse opinions. If speaking against the grain makes you a target of assassins, our country is in deep trouble.
It seems obvious to me that our country needs gun control. But it’s equally obvious that the Supreme Court and the GOP have made almost any kind of gun control impossible. Just this week, a court in Florida struck down a ban on open-carry of guns. The judges said that it was a violation of the Second Amendment to forbid people to carry their gun openly.
We are all targets.
Children in school, people in malls and at concerts will continue to die because of the current insane interpretation of the Second Amendment. Guns are currently the leading cause of death for children and teens. Learning how to react to a murderer is now a rite of passage in school–every kind of school.
The right claims that it’s devoted to the “right to life.” But that’s not true. The right to life is secondary to the right to carry a gun.
The deaths of scores of children and the blood of Charlie Kirk stain the hands of the Supreme Court majority, which strikes down any effort to control access to guns, to require gun-owners to keep their weapons locked away, and to make gun safety a priority rather than a violation of the Second Amendment.
I don’t expect this love affair with deadly weapons will end in my lifetime. I hope it ends someday. Many people will needlessly die before then.
It’s important these days to remember that public schools were created by communities, districts, and states to serve all children and to contribute to the betterment of society. As a result of demands by parents, activists, the courts, and legislators, public schools must serve all children, not just those they choose to admit.
But the consequences of withdrawing from public education could be dire for the U.S. In our 2024 book, “How Government Built America,” we explore the history of public education, from Horace Mann’s “common school movement” in the early 19th century to the GI Bill in the 20th that helped millions of veterans go to college and become homeowners after World War II.
We found that public education has been essential for not only creating an educated workforce but for inculcating the United States’ fundamental values of liberty, equality, fairness and the common good.
In the public good
Opponents of public education often refer to public schools as “government schools,” a pejorative that seems intended to associate public education with “big government” – seemingly at odds with the small government preferenceof many Americans.
But, as we have previously explored, government has always been a significant partner with the private market system in achieving the country’s fundamental political values. Public education has been an important part of that partnership.
Mann, an education reformer often dubbed the father of the American public school system, argued that universal, publicly funded, nonsectarian public schools would help sustain American political institutions, expand the economy and fend off social disorder. Horace Mann was a pioneer of free public schools and Massachusetts’ first secretary of education.
In researching Mann’s common schools and other educational history for our book, two lessons stood out to us.
One is that the U.S. investment in public education over the past 150 years has created a well-educated workforce that has fueled innovation and unparalleled prosperity.
As our book documents, for example, in the late 18th and early 19th centuries the states expanded public education to include high school to meet the increasing demand for a more educated citizenry as a result of the Industrial Revolution. And the GI Bill made it possible for returning veterans to earn college degrees or train for vocations, support young families and buy homes, farms or businesses, and it encouraged them to become more engaged citizens, making “U.S. democracy more vibrant in the middle of the twentieth century.”
And contradicting its stance on ceding more control to states and local communities, the administration has also been mandating what can’t and must be taught in public schools. For example, it’s threatened funding for school districts that recognize transgender identities or teach about structural racism, white privilege and similar concepts. On the other hand, the White House is pushing the use of “patriotic” education that depicts the founding of the U.S. as “unifying, inspiring and ennobling.”
Promoting private education
As Trump and states have cut funding and resources to public education, they’ve been shifting more money to K-12 private schools.
Most recently, the budget bill passed by Congress in July 2025 gives taxpayers a tax credit for donations to organizations that fund private school scholarships. The credit, which unlike a deduction counts directly against how much tax someone owes, is $1,700 for individuals and double for married couples. The total cost could run into the billions, since it’s unclear how many taxpayers will take advantage.
Meanwhile, 33 states direct public money toward private schools by providing vouchers, tax credits or another form of financial assistance to parents. All together, states allocated $8.2 billion to support private school education in 2024.
Government funding of private schools diverts money away from public education and makes it more difficult for public schools to provide the quality of education that would most benefit students and the public at large. In Arizona, for example, many public schools are closing their doors permanently as a result of the state’s support for charter schools, homeschooling and private school vouchers.
That’s because public schools are funded based on how many students they have. As more students switch to private schools, there’s less money to cover teacher salaries and fixed costs such as building maintenance. Ultimately, that means fewer resources to educate the students who remain in the public school system.
Living up to aspirations
We believe the harm to the country of promoting private schools while rolling back support for public education is about more than dollars and cents.
It would mean abandoning the principle of universal, nonsectarian education for America’s children. And in so doing, Mann’s “virtuous citizenry” will be much harder to build and maintain.
America’s private market system, in which individuals are free to contract with each other with minimal government interference, has been important to building prosperity and opportunity in the U.S., as our book documents. But, as we also establish, relying on private markets to educate America’s youth makes it harder to create equal opportunity for children to learn and be economically successful, leaving the country less prosperous and more divided.
Sidney Shapirois a Professor of Law at Wake Forest University. He is affiliated with the Center for Progressive Reform.
Joseph P. Tomainis a Professor of Law at the University of Cincinnati. He does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.
Private and religious schools, in comparison, choose their students. They choose those who are a “good fit.” They choose their co-religionists. They may reject students for any reason. They may say they have the staff to help students with disabilities or those who don’t speak English or those who struggle with school work. The choice is theirs.
It’s a common complaint that the news media is trying so hard to be neutral that they are failing to warn the public about Trump’s efforts to make himself a fascistic emperor.
Trump has shattered norms and traditions by firing members of independent boards who were appointed to serve for a set term. He has cancelled funding authorized by Congress. He has taken control of Congress’s “power of the purse” by announcing draconian tariffs. He has bullied law firms, universities, tech giants, and the media. He ignores the law and the Constitution because no one will stop him. The Republicans who control Congress are hibernating. And they fear his base.
She describes “the Trump Doctrine” in blunt terms: “I can do anything I want to do.” A king? A dictator? An emperor? What other President has asserted his unlimited power to do whatever he wants? It remains to be seen, she acknowledges, whether the Supreme Court will reverse all these rulings against Trump’s overreach.
She writes:
Is Donald Trump tired yet of all the losing? During the past week alone, federal judges across the country have rejected some of the most important and far-reaching of Trump’s initiatives—from his efforts to reshape the global economy with tariffs and mobilize the military to act as police in American cities to his refusal to spend billions of dollars in congressionally appropriated funds. The President continues to cite nonexistent emergencies to justify his executive overreach and judges continue to call him out on it, issuing stern rebukes in the tradition of Judge Beryl Howell, who, during a case this spring about the firings of civil servants, observed that “an American President is not a king—not even an ‘elected’ one.”
I’m not sure that this week’s epic losing streak has received the attention that it deserves, no doubt in part because America had other things to worry about, such as whether Trump was actually alive, despite all the internet rumors. It speaks to the present moment that the President is not only very much still with us but has already started fund-raising off the social-media frenzy surrounding his supposed death over Labor Day weekend. (“These rumors are just another desperate attack from the failing left who can’t stand that we’re WINNING and bigly!” the e-mail pitch that arrived in my inbox on Thursday morning said.) But what does it say about the state of things that disputing rumors of his death turns out to be a welcome distraction from underlying political realities for Trump?…
The latest string of defeats began last Friday, when the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ruled that Trump’s so-called reciprocal tariffs imposing double-digit duties on key trading partners such as Canada, China, and the European Union were illegal. Over the holiday weekend, a federal district judge intervened to stop migrant children from being deported to Guatemala while some of them were already loaded on planes. On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit reinstated a Federal Trade Commissioner, saying that Trump did not have the power that he claimed to fire her. Also that day, another federal judge ruled that, in sending hundreds of National Guard personnel to Los Angeles amid protests of Trump’s immigration crackdown, the President had violated a nineteenth-century law prohibiting the use of troops for domestic law-enforcement purposes. On Wednesday, yet another judge, in Boston, rejected billions of dollars in cuts to research funding for Harvard University, part of a broad war on liberal academia that Trump has made an unlikely centerpiece of his second term. And late on Wednesday night, a federal judge in Washington blocked billions of dollars in Trump-ordered cuts to foreign aid, saying that he was usurping Congress’s power of the purse in refusing to spend the money. This, I should add, is an incomplete list. If nothing else, it shows the extraordinary scope and scale of the battles that Trump has chosen to pursue—suggesting not so much a strategic view of the Presidency as an everything-everywhere-all-at-once vision of unchecked Presidential power.
It’s refreshing to read Glasser. She’s not shrill. She’s not ideological. She’s not afraid.
Greg Olear lays out the frightening parallels between the rise of Hitler and the rise of Trump, quoting from a book written by a German author. The article is longer that what I posted here. Please open the link to read it all. There is no paywall.
I. The United States: A Survey
In just a few months, a coarse, artless, criminal strongman has taken control of the entire federal government—including, as of yesterday, the nation’s capital (or “Capital,” as he writes it, capitalizing his nouns like a good German).
Trump owns the Supreme Court, the Republican Party, the Speaker of the House. Congress is powerless to stop him. The wealthiest tech-bros in Silicon Valley and most of the legacy media CEOs have lined up behind him. Colleges and universities have capitulated to his demands, as have white-shoe law firms and venerable broadcasting companies. He’s transformed U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement into his own secret state police. He’s using the FBI and the Justice Department to attack his enemies. He’s building concentration camps. He’s enriching himself on a grand scale. And every word that comes out of his puckered little mouth is a lie.
How did this happen?
While on vacation in Barcelona, I came across the most cogent explanation I’ve yet encountered. It was written, appropriately, by a German—a brilliant journalist named Sebastian Haffner. Here is an excerpt:
At rally after rally all through the summer and fall of 2024, Trump bellowed that he would win—his supporters didn’t even have to vote, because he had Elon’s help—and then heads would roll. Nothing happened. The white-haired attorney general did not think of changing his strategy, insisting instead on the preservation of “norms.” In the presidential election against Joe Biden, Trump had declared that victory was his, in any case. Nothing happened. When he said it again at his next rally, the audience tittered, as if it had been tickled. The House invested considerable time and energy investigating the coup attempt of January 6th, in which his supporters besieged the Capitol and policemen were killed, and concluded that Trump was responsible. Nothing happened. No, something did happen: the insurrectionists were pardoned.
It was strange to observe how the behavior of each side reinforced that of the other: the savage impudence that gradually made it possible for the unpleasant orange apostle of hate to assume the proportions of a demon; the bafflement of his tamers, who always realized just too late exactly what it was he was up to—namely, when he capped it with something even more outrageous and monstrous; then, also, the hypnotic trance into which his public fell, succumbing with less and less resistance to the glamour of depravity and the ecstasy of evil.
Besides, he promised everything to everybody, which naturally brought him a vast, loose army of followers and voters from among the ignorant, the disappointed, and the dispossessed.
Spot on, right?
Here’s the twist: Haffner wrote that in 1939—before the Nazis invaded Poland. He was reflecting on how the “unpleasant little apostle of hate”—I swapped “orange” for “little”—had come to power: how Hitler had bamboozled the German people into voting away their freedom, and how the German people had failed to meet the moment.
Obviously I modified the first paragraph to serve my rhetorical purposes, but the spirit of the original is unchanged: a loud, hateful psychopath keeps pushing and pushing and pushing, no one in a position of authority stops him, and the unthinkable comes true. This is what Haffner actually wrote:
Summoned as a witness before the highest German court, Hitler bellowed at the judges that he would one day come to power by strictly constitutional means and then heads would roll. Nothing happened. The white-haired president of the supreme court did not think of ordering the witness to be taken into custody for contempt. In the presidential elections against Hindenburg, Hitler declared that victory was his, in any case. His opponent was eighty-five, he was forty-three; he could wait. Nothing happened. When he said it again at his next meeting, the audience tittered, as if it had been tickled. One night, six storm troopers fell on a “dissident” in his bed and literally trampled him to death, for which they were sentenced to death. Hitler sent them a telegram of praise and acknowledgment. Nothing happened. No, something did happen: the murderers were pardoned.
The parallels are as obvious as they are disturbing.
Haffner—the pen name of Raimund Pretzel—was born in Berlin in 1907, the son of a Prussian government official. As a boy, he thrilled to the exploits of the Kaiser’s army during the Great War, like most of his contemporaries. He was not particularly “political.” He did not care for the Communists; if anything, he was more “right” than “left.” But he loathed Adolf Hitler and the Nazis. He realized early on, in the years after the First World War, that political zealotry in Berlin was the province of “the more stupid, coarse, and unpleasant among my schoolfellows”—and all of those young, dumb bullies bought what the creepy watercolorist from Linz was selling. Haffner himself was “Aryan,” but he had a lot of Jewish friends, including his then-girlfriend, and he was morally outraged at the disgusting anti-Semitism of the Nazi Party.
As the situation grew more dire, Haffner fled Berlin, first to Paris, then to London, where, in 1939, he began a memoir—an account of how the Nazis had come to power. Unlike other works of this kind, his book is not an examination of what Hitler did, but rather how the German people, especially the ones who should have known better, reacted and responded to what Hitler did. He makes the case that his experience, as an individual German citizen living through the rise of the Third Reich, reflected the experience of hundreds of thousands of German citizens—the majority of whom, after all, had notvoted for the Nazis. The book is a chronicle of the political zeitgeist. It tracks the evolution of the emotions, the feelings, the vibes of the German nation, and explicates how and why Adolf Hitler, of all people, this nebbishy little weirdo, became not only chancellor but führer.
Published in German as Germany: A Survey, in English, the memoir is called Defying Hitler—a poor title, as it isn’t representative of the contents (there is not much defying of Hitler going on); plus, functionally, having HITLER emblazoned on the cover of a book makes it awkward to read at the airport.
Haffner abandoned the project in 1939, after the war started, “presumably because its theme is the question of how it was possible for the Nazis to come to power,” as his son and (wonderful) translator, Oliver Pretzel, explains in the introduction. “Instead he started another one, whose subject was the more urgent question of how to deal with Nazi Germany.”
The manuscript sat unread in a filing cabinet for decades. It was only published in 2001, two years after Haffner’s death, becoming a best-seller in Germany. While his original plan for A Survey was to chronicle his experiences through his emigration to England in 1938, he doesn’t get nearly that far. The action breaks off in 1933. I would have loved for it to continue—it feels like if Andor hadn’t come back for the second season—but he gives us more than enough insight to make his point.
January 30, 1933 The moribund president, Hindenburg—a “traitor,” Haffner rightly calls him—appoints Hitler as chancellor. Nazis are now in charge of Germany.
February 27, 1933 The Reichstag Fire—a “false flag” act of terrorism blamed on the rival Communists and used as a pretext for Hitler to crack down on his political opponents.
March 5, 1933 In the last free elections, the Nazis garner 43.9 percent of the popular vote—but exploit the parliamentary system and the feckless leaders of the German Nationalist People’s Party to remain in control.
March 22, 1933 The first concentration camp is established at Dachau, where dissidents and political opponents of the Nazis are sent after their arrests.
March 23, 1933 The Enabling Act grants Hitler dictatorial powers.
April 1, 1933 The Nazis impose a national boycott of Jewish-owned businesses. This kicks off an incremental process of barring German Jews from the civil service, the legal profession, the armed forces, the arts, agriculture, journalism, and so on.
April 26, 1933 The Gestapo—a truncation of Geheime Staatspolizei; literally the secret state police—is established.
As you can see—and as any American paying attention to the news these days can attest—it does not take that long for a stubborn and dedicated strongman, however ridiculous he may appear, to acquire fearsome authoritarian powers.
Defying Hitler is jawdroppingly good: as a piece of writing, as a personal memoir, as a social history, as a political analysis. And it is eerily, uncomfortably, shockingly current. I lost track of how many times I gasped out loud as I was reading, noting the unpleasant similarities between Germany in 1933 and the U.S. right now. Insofar as Trump has modeled himself on Hitler, and MAGA on the Nazi Party, the book is instructive—terrifying, to be sure, but not unhopeful.
Because of the ticking-time-bomb urgency, I’m going to quote from the book at length in this two-part piece, and hope that Mr. Pretzel does not object. With that said, I urge everyone to buy Defying Hitler and read it. Haffner’s memoir is beautifully written, short, fascinating, and not as depressing as the subject matter suggests. His disappointment and disgust with his countrymen feels very familiar. Defying Hitler is the single most important work I’ve come across, in terms of understanding the here and now.
There are, to reiterate, an alarming number of parallels between Germany in 1933 and the United States today. But there are also subtle differences, which, I believe, and which I hope, augur a better future here now than there then. The key difference, of course, as I’ve said many times on various broadcasts, is that the Germans of 1933 did not have the benefit of knowing what happened in Germany in 1933. They were caught blindsided. We have no such excuse.
Especially given this historical hindsight, it is both shameful and depressing that Donald Trump was elected a second time. But the historical precedent for such national stupidity still exists, as Haffner shows.
Tom Nichols of The Atlantic published an article that explained why Trump is a laughing stock among other world leaders. The recent meeting of the leaders of China, Russia, North Korea, and India was convened to celebrate the victory over Japan in 1945. Trump was not invited. He proceeded to write whiny complaints on social media about being left out.
They laugh at him. They saw how Putin played Trump like a violin when they met in Alaska. The meeting was supposedly about Putin agreeing to a ceasefire in Ukraine. Trump rolled out a red carpet for Putin. Waited for him, clapped his hands in excitement as Putin approached. At the meeting’s end, Putin spoke first, which is not customary. Then he departed, skipping a lunch that Trump planned in his honor.
Putin made a fool of Trump.
The next night, Russia bombsrded Kyiv with an unprecedented number of drones and missiles, aimed at civilian targets.
Putin and the others know that Pete Hegseth is an empty suit. Trump busies himself redecorating the White House and its grounds. Trump is not a serious man. He can be ignored.
The leaders of Russia, China, and North Korea are not good men. They preside over brutal autocracies replete with secret police and prison camps. But they are, nevertheless, serious men, and they know an unserious man when they see one. For nearly a decade, they have taken Donald Trump’s measure, and they have clearly reached a conclusion: The president of the United States is not worthy of their respect.
Wednesday’s military parade in Beijing is the most recent evidence that the world’s authoritarians consider Trump a lightweight. Russian President Vladimir Putin, Chinese President Xi Jinping, and North Korea’s maximum nepo baby, Kim Jong Un, gathered to celebrate the 80th anniversary of Japan’s surrender in World War II. (Putin’s Belarusian satrap, Alexander Lukashenko, was also on hand.) The American president was not invited: After all, what role did the United States play in defeating Japan and liberating Eurasia? Instead, Trump, much like America itself, was left to watch from the sidelines.
When I first heard that an American fighter plane had attacked a boat in international waters off Venezuela, my first thought was that there must have been a high-value target on that boat. I waited for the details, but they were never released. Eventually I heard that there were 11 people on the boat. Trump and Secretary of War Hegseth said that they were gang members and they had a boatload of drugs that they were intending to bring to the U.S.
I looked at that video released by the War Department, and I was struck by two anomalies. First, the boat wasn’t large enough to travel from Venezuela to the U.S. But more importantly, could a small boat with 11 people have room for a significant load of drugs? It didn’t seem so.
Where was the evidence that this boat was bringing drugs to the U.S. I never heard it. Secretary Hegseth would clarify the reason for the attack in the boat if he supplied facts and evidence. Does Trump plan to attack other boats and ships that may or may not be carrying a shipment of drugs.
When the Court says Trump is above the law, who speaks for the eleven dead on that boat? Their lives ended not in a battlefield crossfire or a clash between nations, but at the whim of one man emboldened by six justices who declared him untouchable.
Trump simply ordered human beings erased, confident the Court had given him immunity from any consequence and the leaders of his military would obey an illegal order. Eleven souls were sacrificed not just to his cruelty, but to a judicial betrayal that transformed the presidency into a license to kill.
For most of our history, American presidents have at least gone through the motions of cloaking lethal force in some form of legal justification.
Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War but sought Congress’s approval. Franklin Roosevelt went to Congress for Lend-Lease before escalating aid to Britain, and sought a declaration of war against Japan. George W. Bush and Barack Obama leaned heavily on the post-9/11 Authorizations for Use of Military Force to justify everything from Afghanistan to drone strikes in Yemen and Somalia to killing Bin Laden.
The principle has always been that the United States does not simply kill people without some kind of legal process. It may be stretched, it may be abused, but it has been invoked.
What Donald Trump has now done with the strike on a small boat off Venezuela’s coast is to break that tradition in a way that is both lawless and unprecedented. He gave the order to kill eleven human beings with no congressional approval, no international authorization, and no visible evidence justifying it.
This was simply murder on the high seas. And the world knows it….
If America embraces this new Putin-like assertion of America’s power to bomb anybody, anywhere, on the whim of the president, we’ll have abandoned any claim to moral leadership.
Worse, we will have normalized the authoritarian logic that anyone the president labels an enemy can be eliminated without trial, without evidence, without process. We’ll have handed Xi a rationale to attack Taiwan; all he has to do is claim that a non-governmental gang within that nation is importing drugs into China (or something similar).
The international reaction has already been severe. America’s allies are horrified, our adversaries have been emboldened, and human rights groups are openly appalled.
But the real test is here at home. Do we still believe in the principle, famously cited by our second President John Adams, that America is a nation of laws and not of men? Do we still insist that presidents cannot kill at will? If Trump can strike a boat off Venezuela today, what is to stop him from ordering lethal force against dissidents, protesters, or political opponents tomorrow?
Mike DeGuire, veteran educator in Denver, fears that billionaires are paying the bills for a phony reform group that’s trying to buy the Denver school board. The billionaires find Denver an enticing target because its leading public officials are DFER Democrats: Michael Bennett is a Colorado Senator and a big supporter of charter schools when he was Denver’s Superintendent of Schools; Governor Jared Polis opened charter schools and is a charter cheerleader; Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, a former TFA and state legislator, loves charters and evaluating teachers by their students’ test scores (he sponsored legislation to make teacher evaluation-by-value-added-scores state law).
Please note that the Dark Money groups use names intended to fool the public into thinking they represent parents and families. They don’t.
School board elections in Denver have become increasingly expensive, and the outcomes often hinge on the amount of money spent by competing groups. According to Chalkbeat, “In Denver Public Schools politics, pro-charter organizations like Denver Families Action are on one side and the Denver Classroom Teachers Association union is on the other.”
In the 2023 Denver Public Schools school board race, Denver Families Action spent nearly $1 million through its independent expenditure committee Better Leaders Stronger Schools, outspending “the Denver teachers’ union 5 to 1.” That election nearly tied the record for all-time spending in a DPS school board race at $2.2 million. For the first time, Denver Families Action also paid for TV ads with dark money that featured Denver Mayor Mike Johnstonsupporting their endorsed candidates.
The money paid off, and all three won.
The Denver Classrooms Teachers Association is rooted in a local, democratic labor process since its funding comes from nearly 4,000 educators.
Denver Families Action, however, is the “political arm” of Denver Families for Public Schools, an organization whose name might suggest local representation yet it is funded by billionaire donors from outside Denver.
The near-historic spending by Denver Families Action in 2023 has its roots in a national strategy spearheaded by billionaires Reed Hastings and John Arnold. In 2018, a leaked presentation described how their new organization, City Fund, planned to invest $200 million to “increase charter school representation up to 50% in over 40 cities.” Denver has been one of their prime targets.
City Fund’s investment highlighted the DPS “portfolio model” which closes or replaces neighborhood schools that fail to meet standardized test-score benchmarks and then reopens them as charter schools. Since implementing the portfolio model in 2007, DPS closed or replaced dozens of neighborhood schools. Today, DPS has more than 50 charters. The model also weakens union influence“by reducing the number of schools whose teachers belong to the union, diminishing the union’s membership — and thus its power and its money.”
City Fund’s strategy has met with some resistance. In 2021, school board members from six cities criticized City Fund and their locally funded “activist groups” writing they “present themselves as local grassroots organizations when nothing could be further from the truth.” They warned that the billionaire-driven privatization erodes local control, divides school districts, and undermines democratic ideals.
Denver’s experience reflects similar concerns. In Denver, financial backing from wealthy advocates of charter schools ensured that pro-charter school board members dominated the board for over a decade. But in 2019, three teacher union-backed candidates unexpectedly won. This raised alarm among charter school advocates who worried the new board might dismantle past reforms, and ongoing enrollment declines also raised concerns.
In response to these events, City Fund helped launch Denver Families for Public Schools with backing from four Denver charter networks: DSST, STRIVE Prep, Rocky Mountain Prep, and University Prep. DFPS’s executive director, Ray Rivera, acknowledged their goal was to elevate the “voices of families who attend these charter schools in Denver and making sure they’re part of the public policy that gets made.”
DFPS received nearly $4 million from City Fund’s political arm, Campaign for Great Public Schools, and in 2024, they merged with another activist group, RootED, which had received over $34 millionfrom City Fund for charter expansion and grants to community organizations. Their combined resources now total about $8 million, allowing DFPS to hire staff, fund charter schools and community groups, pay canvassers up to $36 an hour, and organize advocacy campaigns to elect pro-charter candidates.
DFPS is led by Pat Donovan, the former managing partner with RootEd, who also chairs the board of Rocky Mountain Prep, a charter network with twelve DPS schools. In addition, Donovan serves on the boards of the Colorado League of Charter Schoolsand KIPP Colorado. City Fund CEO Marlon Marshall also serves on the board of Rocky Mountain Prep. These overlapping roles highlight how interconnected the interests of City Fund and Denver Families for Public Schools are, and how DFPS is integral in the school privatizationmovement in Denver.
DCTA’s funding is transparent and tied directly to local educators. By contrast, DFPS’s money originates from a national network of wealthy donors whose priorities do not necessarily align with the entire Denver community. This imbalance means one side can dominate the narrative, drowning out authentic community voices.
When voters receive glossy mailers or see a targeted ad, they may believe they are hearing from grassroots “families” or “students.” However, the spending often comes from the billionaires who fund Denver Families for Public Schools. This is where democracy is at risk. Without transparency, voters cannot fully assess the motives behind the messaging.
Denver’s school board should prioritize issues like equitable funding, strengthening neighborhood schools, and supporting educators. If the dark money spending levels are repeated, or surpassed, in the 2025 races, local priorities risk being overshadowed by billionaire-backed agendas.
The question for Denver voters this fall is straightforward: Will they allow outside money to dictate the future of their public schools, or will they insist on authentic local voices leading the way?
Mike DeGuire, Ph.D., is the vice chair of Advocates for Public Education Policy. He has been a teacher, district level reading coordinator, executive coach, and a principal in the Denver metro area for most of his education career. He also worked as a leadership consultant for several national education organizations, and as an educator effectiveness specialist with the Colorado Department of Education. His writing is also featured on a4pep.org.
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